Artist Margaret Noble attaches fishing line to paper dolls that will then be hung in f her exhibit “44th and Landis” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The exhibit is based largely on Noble’s experience growing up in City Heights.

About the series

What is the “creative process”? Where does art come from, and how does an artist develop it, from idea to finished artwork?

We’re following San Diego artist Margaret Noble as she considers, creates and constructs “44th and Landis,” a large multimedia work on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego downtown through Jan. 20.

We hope to provide some answers, as well pose a few more questions.

March 25: Cutting across boundaries: Noble aspires to reach a broader audience as she gathers a circle of artists around her to help her reach her goal.

Today: Assembly required: Noble installs her finished piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Among the crowd at the Aug. 9 opening of Margaret Noble's "44th and Landis" at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego were Museum of Man CEO Micah Parzen and his wife, Marguerite Parzen.
— James Gregg

After months of planning, design, fabrication and composition, one question remained as artist Margaret Noble started to install her new artwork, “44th and Landis,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego: How high should it be?

The museum’s associate curator, Jill Dawsey, thought the piece, which is made up of nearly 400 stylized paper dolls suspended from the ceiling, should be hung relatively high, giving it a more sculptural appearance.

Noble, however, thought the dolls should be hung lower, especially in the main gallery, allowing the viewers to more easily see the painstakingly executed details.

“In this room, I’m totally with her,” said Noble, standing in the smaller of the two adjacent galleries that will house her large-scale, multimedia installation. The dolls are divided into five groups, and the fifth group is hung separately in that small gallery.

“But in that (larger) room, because it is narrative-driven, people need to read the details, although from a sculptural perspective, I think it would be exciting to have (the dolls) really high up. So we’re trying to find a middle ground.”

Noble is the artist, and Dawsey, a curator who sees herself as an artist’s advocate, would ultimately support what the artist wants.

“Of course I can call the shots,” Noble said. “But I don’t want to miss an opportunity to learn and make the work better. So that’s the tension, right?”

Art lessons

Noble has learned a lot from creating “44th and Landis,” one of 15 projects underwritten by the San Diego Foundation Creative Catalyst Fund. The work is on exhibit through Jan. 20, with several performances scheduled for October and November by Noble, who teaches at High Tech High and whose résumé includes five years as a DJ in Chicago.

“What haven’t I learned?” Noble said.

“First of all, just learning how to write that grant proposal was insane. How many books did I research to learn about grant writing — and how to think about your work and how to speak about your work?”

Her list continues: design, sculpture, narrative structure, developing a color palette, how to support visuals with sound in a non-performative context, how to manage time, how to work with people in complicated situations, how to manage interns, how to talk to the media … .

“I’ve been taking lessons everyday,” she said. “I’ve learned a massive amount — an MFA. I hate to say it, but I’ve learned more from this than I learned in my MFA (from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) about real art making.”

Her encounter with Dawsey, who is fiercely supportive of Noble and her work (she’s done everything during the work’s installation from helping Noble string the dolls to insisting that the artist eat lunch), illustrates Noble’s most important lesson: Stay true to your vision, but stay flexible as well.

In the work’s developmental stages back in January, Noble surrounded herself with collaborators to help with the visual and structural elements of the installation envisioned in a very specific proposal she and the museum submitted for the Creative Catalyst grant.

“You write this proposal saying what you are going to do,” Noble said. “But you don’t really know what you’re going to do.”

Early on, she decided that the video she outlined in the proposal would be a distraction. So that element was eliminated.

Then she realized that having an elaborate framework (from which the dolls would be suspended) would also distract from the work’s focus. So the frame (and the consultant helping with the frame) were dropped. The dolls are suspended directly from the ceiling (she spent much of her first day at the museum creating templates so the museum’s crew would know where to drill hundreds of holes in the ceiling).

She and visual collaborator Bridget Roundtree seemed to have reached a definitive vision of how the dolls, which combine imagery from both the Victorian era and ’80s hip-hop culture, would look in March. Ultimately, however, Noble was not comfortable with their collaborative outcome.

“It was like, let’s see what we can do with paper dolls,” Noble said. “It wasn’t saying anything. Well, it kind of was, but it didn’t go anywhere. There wasn’t a narrative structure. That’s why I was frustrated.”

She worked to “clean and refine” the dolls and the way they were organized, dividing the installation into five sections and making what had been an almost subliminal narrative more overt.

But even within the last several months, the dolls for the fifth grouping, which are arranged in the shape of a chandelier, weren’t exactly what she envisioned when they came back from the fabricator.

“You don’t know until you touch or see something what it will be,” she said. “They just seemed flat.”

She reworked, reprinted and recut the dolls on glossy paper, and with the help of another collaborator, Katie Rast from Fab Lab, designed and produced acrylic forms that now frame the dolls and make the installation significantly brighter.

“This room is like a gift,” she said, laying out the forms in a circular shape on the floor. “I wasn’t even going to use this room and they encouraged me to use it, so I think that has be taken seriously and I have to do my best. I really wanted something sparkling and magical, so that’s what I did. Now, I’m very satisfied with the outcome.”

Final fantasy

That small gallery is in a sense the work’s payoff. The four groupings of dolls in the main gallery evoke aspects of a child’s view of the City Heights neighborhood where Noble grew up (a half-block from 44th and Landis). Just as Noble and other children negotiated the neighborhood, viewers are asked to negotiate the groupings of paper dolls and other suspended elements.

That fifth group, alone in the smaller gallery, offers a kind of culmination, perhaps a view of the people Noble and her childhood friends have become.

“There’s the journey,” Noble said. “Then this is who you think you might be. But it may not be who you are. It’s a fantasy of who you might be.”

She pointed to a cutout of an elegant Victorian dress, but embodied in the design of the dress was a pack of Camel cigarettes. The closer you look, what at first appears to be some sort of princess fantasy has a decidedly darker side.

“Look at those beautiful slippers,” Noble said. But the slippers also had the Budweiser logo.

“Or look at these ghosts (from “Ms. Pac-Man”) inside this strawberry you were hoping to eat. Or there’s this Victorian dress, but in leopard print. …

“There’s satire; there’s questioning. … What is the ideal, or the perceived ideal, that we are told is best to emulate as we grow up? Can we live up to these notions and is it worth trying?”

While the height issue was addressed to Noble and Dawsey’s satisfaction, it turns out there are more, less easily resolved questions in Noble’s work.

It’s the nature of art that each viewer will have his or her own answer.